The Next Two Months

The advent of Trump 2.0 has reinforced a bit of self-knowledge for me— I am a strategist not a reporter. I don’t simply want to pass on information, but information located in the causal chain from the recent (and sometimes deep) past to the foreseeable future. I want to think about what we should be doing over the next six months to efficiently counter the Trump calamity. My goal in writing will always be to use my skills in history and military strategy to project what we should be doing going forward.

We have already taken the first necessary step, which is to sue the hell out of the Trump Administration. Currently 81 (!!!!) suits have been filed, and there have been only 3 defeats. This is particularly gratifying to me because I’m not a lawyer, and I could not possibly make this happen. (BTW, I hate when I cannot make things happen.) But hundreds of lawyers and the attorneys general of 22 blue states have jumped on Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional actions with a breathtaking level of zeal. So far, Federal judges like what they see.

I predict that the Supreme Court will not rule on a Trump-related case before the end of April. The courts believe that haste makes them look partisan. The Supreme Court has just refused to hear the Dellinger case (described in a previous post) on an expedited schedule. Thus, the Supreme Court has emphatically refused to give the Trump Administration a quick win. Please chew on that! I predict that the Supreme Court will eventually give the Trump administration its Dellinger win, but only after it has given Trump at least one resounding defeat on a far more important case. Chief Justice Roberts is totally in charge of the Supreme Court schedule, and he will make it so.

In another example of judicial deliberateness, a Trump-appointed appellate judge in Washington state told the Trumpsters that their desire to deny birthright citizenship to babies was hardly an emergency. Her court will hear the case in J*U*N*E in the normal course of business. She also expressed doubt about whether denying birthright citizenship to babies was critical to enhancing security on the southern border. Hint: Rumor has it that babies can’t crawl across the southern border until they are at least nine months old.

Indeed, no less than four federal judges have required the Trump Administration to give birthright citizenship to every baby born in the United States (except for those born to members of the diplomatic corps who are not under the jurisdiction of US law). These four judges hail from across the political spectrum, appointed by Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

My Perspective from History

I am a historian, and I have been a historian since I was 7 years old. I apparently got the gene from my mother who told stories of family history going back to the 19^th century. She not only told stories from her side of the family, but from my father’s side too, stories he never told us himself. In retrospect, it seems clear that I was the only one of her four children who was listening.

My first formal contact with history came when I read my first “thick” (non-picture) book at age seven. It was illustrated with small stick figures of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans dressed in exotic garb. I found these folks as mesmerizing as if they were visitations by Martians, Venusians, and Plutonians. Here were alternate realities that had really existed, not dubious and flimsy human imaginations cooked up by ink-stained sci-fi wretches. From then on, I spent my childhood looking for more history books to read.

If this seems a bit much, I tested in 6^th grade as reading on an 11^th grade level. People ask me, “Why do you read so much?” and I always answer, “It keeps me out of trouble.”

I also read because, “Knowledge is power.” For me, the worst feeling in the world is being blindsided. When COVID first hit, I read every syllable about it I could find. One of the greatest moments of relief in my life came when I saw the information that 50% of the people who went into intensive care in China with COVID survived. This was so early in the pandemic that China was reporting a total of 2500 deaths at the time, probably fairly close to the truth. This single fact (50% survival by those who entered the ICU) showed me that COVID 19 was not in the league of Ebola or the Black Death. Clearly, our 21^st century pandemic was going to be bad, but not civilization ending.

Indeed, all you really needed to know about COVID were three facts: (a) it was fundamentally survivable (killed less than 10% of those infected), (b) it was transmitted by aerosol droplets (and could be stymied by antiviral masks), and (c) a great vaccine was on the way.

Then I turned my research into action: I learned there are four certified antiviral masks, manufactured in four different locations: the United States (N95), South Korea (KF94), China (KN95), and EU (FFP2). These masks are designed to protect medical workers in hospitals from catching viral illnesses. These are the masks that Fauci told us we didn’t need to have. I thought we did need to have them. I spent three days researching websites where these masks could be obtained and created a comment that gave links to multiple sources for the masks, including child-size masks.

Throughout the next month, I posted this comment literally dozens of times on the New York Times and Washington Post, getting up early so that I could catch the first story written about COVID each day so I could post my comment immediately for maximum visibility. These comments accumulated thousands of likes and I don’t think it is unrealistic to think that I saved a few lives. Knowledge is power, but not everyone has three days available to look for sources of antiviral masks.

That’s what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to figure out what we should do next to throw effective roadblocks in the way of Donald Trump. We can’t stop everything, and real damage will be done that we can’t prevent.

The Next Two Months

To summarize, although the Supreme Court is the most critical actor in this phase of the struggle, there will be some time before we learn whether Trump will defy a Supreme Court order or not. As noted above, my history forecast calls for a pause of two months before we hear from the Supreme Court. Hence, we have time to consider other things before we learn how Trump will react to the Supreme Court.

Here are some topics I plan to cover in the next few weeks:

• Why my history forecast about Elon Musk (and Trump 2.0) was totally wrong

• What ordinary people can do to oppose Trump most effectively

• Why Trump’s budget will crash and burn— great news!

• Why the courts can oppose Trump more effectively on some issues than others— what can we do on issues where the courts can have no impact?

• What role will the military play in upholding or destroying constitutional order?

• Do Trump’s past behavior and present demeanor suggest that he will obey or defy a Supreme Court order?

• Is Trump’s support among swing voters waning and does it matter?

Unless I change my mind, which I do frequently, I will write about all these issues. Perhaps you would want to nudge me toward writing about one of them first in the poll below.

Sorry— there wasn't space in the poll format for all the topics.